FamilySearch’s Secret Weapon: Court Order Books
From widows to orphans, soldiers to sheriffs, the court orders address the issues that its citizenry bring to its attention. Court suits, petitions, requests for compensation, a new (or better road or one that doesn’t go through the middle of their cornfield), permission to build a mill dam, a demand for freedom from indenture or unjust slavery, all come before the court and are recorded on the pages of the orders (and/or minutes). Usually incompletely or totally unindexed, finding the jewels among these pages often requires a page-by-page search in a courthouse or via a microfilm reader. Today, one can, thanks to FamilySearch, peruse many of these online.
Chancery Records: The Secrets They Hold, The Families They Reveal
Although this will use Virginia examples, it will explain how these can be found in every state, and sometimes online.
Controversies over ownership of land, division of estates and guardianship of children are settled in a chancery court. Theft, murder and assault are tried in a court of law. Both of these courts generate records which can provide information of interest to the researcher; however, it is the chancery court which most often provides the proof of relationships that are sought by so many researchers.
Chancery suits frequently deal with estate division. In the process of determining how the estate is to be divided, they often provide the researcher with detailed lists of family members for multiple generations, place(s) of residence and other details. Suits dealing with land ownership will often include depositions by neighbors and details regarding when an area was settled. This lecture discusses how to find these unindexed loose records and interpret the information in them.
But, I’ve Looked Everywhere
Finding records can often be the most difficult part of the search. Burned counties, missing documents, no record was made all lean to frustration. Learn how to expand your research into the lesser known records that can often solve your most difficult problems.